Reddit recently rendered the former TRAC system obsolete to make way for their new integrated subreddit wiki system. However, to put it bluntly, the subreddit Wiki system is pretty poor (even though it is an upgrade to the TRAC system). In the end, I decided that a wiki format would be better for the FAQ, and so I started a Wikia. Since then, I and Mob_King have been porting over the old FAQ's content, as well as improving and writing new content as we go.

It works without a VPN, obviously.

Please let me know any feedback - like it/hate it/whatever. Leave a comment here, PM me or Mob_King, or leave comments on the Wiki itself if you have a Wikia account. Happy to hear any suggestions for improvements. So far it is very barebones - the content has been migrated from the old FAQ and plenty more has been added, but there is a lot of work still to do in terms of structuring the content and adding more. Please remember this is a work in progress, so your suggestions for ways to improve the experience are always welcomed!

This is a work in progress. There are probably a few spelling/grammar mistakes in there (on the pages that Mob_King edited, anyway >:D), and parts need re-writing for style consistency, etc. However, there's enough content on there right now that I'm happy to release it to the public as we continue to improve it. Ideally I would have liked to get a bit further before unleashing it but to be honest, at the moment it's hard to find time to really go at it like I would like to. Will probably do a fair bit of solidifying and adding new content over the CNY break.

This is something of a labour of love and we have some pretty cool plans for the project. For that reason I'm politely asking everybody not to vandalise it for laughs. It is editable by anybody, but please don't get in there and add false information or delete pages, or anything like that. I don't want to have to put the thing on lockdown, we're all adults here. I do get notifications every time anything is edited or created so don't think you're going to be able to stealthily add "kinggimped blows goats" to random pages without me noticing.

While it is still /r/shanghai specific, we want to provide a guide that is going to be useful for anybody coming to Shanghai, not only redditors.

Since I and Mob_King both have full time jobs it's difficult currently to dedicate a lot of time to improving and adding to the FAQ, but we're both doing short stints every day and in our free time to keep it growing and up to date.

Obviously we do not get any money from advertising or businesses asking us to promote them: all recommendations are purely anecdotal or from users in previous threads on /r/shanghai. For example, the article on accommodation recommends a few hostels by name - these are hostels that I've actually stayed at or been to. They're not paying me to recommend them.

"Laowaikipedia" was Mob_King's idea, I can take no credit/blame for that one.

The overall aims of the FAQ are:

To answer commonly asked questions and present an up-to-date overview of common Shanghai-related items and situations. We're not going for full-on detail - you can go to Wikipedia for that. The article on the metro, for example, is intended as a practical guide on using the metro, not a document telling you facts about the system itself.

To present recommendations for commonly asked queries ("where's good to eat?", "where can I take my girlfriend when she comes to visit?", "where can I get a decent fake watch and how much should I be paying?", etc.). We're not going to have entries for individual restaurants, that's too specific and that kind of information is available on other sites in much better detail (SmartShanghai/CityWeekend). We are not shills (see penultimate bullet point above).

How can you help?

Eventually we want everything to be original content - currently we are using quite a few Creative Commons licensed photos, but we want to replace all of those eventually with original images crowdsourced from the /r/shanghai community! So if you have any good pictures that would work as illustrative images for the FAQ, please PM me what you've got! You will be given full credit for your contributions, of course.

See some information that's out of date or just plain wrong? Tell us about it, or even edit it yourself.

Thanks everybody! We welcome your feedback/suggestions. Eventually this thing should be a great resource, but it's only been live for a couple of weeks so far and we haven't been able to dedicate as much time to it as we would like. It's still a bit, well, skeletal. But considering how it was all red links 2 weeks ago, we're slowly getting there!

Where is your usual cynicism? Where is the real TeaDrinkerToo and what have you done with him?

Thanks though :) Most of the info in the wiki was already present in the old FAQ, but it's much nicer and more easily digestible in Wiki format, especially with how easy it is to interlink entries and include images. Definitely a huge upgrade over the old TRAC FAQ, and we have a lot of plans in the works to make it a really awesome resource in the future.

I'm pretty much brand new to Shanghai and have the whole city to explore. If you'd like to send me on any specific missions to take photos or what have you, let me know and I'll be happy to contribute. If any other Redditors want to join me that would be great too!